The journalist Meredith Wadman discusses her new book The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease (Viking, 2017), with Joseph Planta.

The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease by Meredith Wadman (Viking, 2017). Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: The Vaccine Race

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, at TheCommentary.ca.

One of the more engaging, highly readable and fascinating reads you’ll have this year will be the book from Meredith Wadman, The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease. It looks at the era beginning in the early 1960s, when biologists in Philadelphia began using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, and produced safe, clean cells that allowed for the creation of a number of vaccines. Meredith Wadman joins me now, and we’ll discuss the people in her book, from the biologists and the vaccine developers, the politics around it all, and the large sums of money the pharmaceutical industry has derived from all the research that’s yielded lifesaving vaccinations for millions of people around the world. Meredith Wadman was born in Vancouver and went on to complete her education at UBC Medical School and Oxford, where she is the second female Rhodes Scholar ever from British Columbia. She later studied journalism at Stanford and Columbia. She has covered biomedical research from Washington, DC for over twenty years now, reporting for Science, as well as Nature, Fortune, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. This new book is published by Viking. Please welcome to the Planta: On the Line program, from here in Vancouver today, Meredith Wadman; Dr. Wadman, good morning.

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